Why we built Melody
Melody started as an experiment inside Kurve, a creative studio shipping hundreds of UGC ads a month for global brands. We kept seeing the same thing: the right track turned a good video into a cultural moment — and a streaming hit.
The background
Our team at Kurve is a small part of a much bigger picture. Every day, brands, agencies, creators and influencers ship an enormous volume of paid and organic UGC across TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.
There's no single global dataset for sponsored UGC and influencer videos, but triangulating creator counts, campaign frequency and posts-per-creator points to roughly 100M – 250M sponsored UGC / influencer videos in 2024 and 150M – 300M+ in 2025 — and that's before counting the orders-of-magnitude larger pool of purely organic UGC.
Over 200 million people now call themselves content creators, and roughly 10% earn $100K or more — a market valued at $21.1 billion. Almost every one of those videos needs a soundtrack — and almost none of them are paying the artist behind it.
Note: There is no single global dataset that directly counts sponsored UGC or influencer videos produced per year. The 100–300M range above is a rough, order-of-magnitude estimate triangulated from public creator-economy data (HypeAuditor, influencer marketing spend reports, platform creator counts) and typical campaign structures (creators per campaign × videos per creator × campaigns per year). Actual figures may be higher.
The opportunity
We started collaborating with artists and publishers — adding a track requirement to the briefs we shared with creators and influencers. Then we measured what happened across the digital streaming platforms during paid amplification.
When the data showed a clear lift in streams, the next step was obvious: turn the workflow into a product so the wider music industry could leverage the millions of UGC videos created every month around the world.
That product is Melody.
From experiment to platform
Melody connects three groups that have rarely been able to work together at speed: indie artists with great catalogues, brands and agencies producing modern ad creative, and the creators who turn songs into culture. Pre-cleared licenses, fair splits to artists, and tooling built for the way ads are actually made today.
See it in action
The thesis isn't theoretical. Read how a single indie track turned into a global viral moment with hundreds of millions of UGC views and tens of millions of streams.
Read the Corook case studyGet involved
Whether you make music, make ads, or both — there's a place for you on Melody.